Business Minor

You cannot run successfully any kind of economic activity — whether a start-up or small family business, a large multinational firm, a nonprofit organization, or even a government agency — without the right information. Accounting is often called “the language of business” because its purpose is to measure, analyze, and report both financial and nonfinancial information to help plan, communicate, and implement an organization’s strategic goals and evaluate and control its performance.

In this course, you will learn to apply state-of-the-art techniques to identify and measure costs and benefits relevant for making decisions, effectively allocate an organization’s economic resources, analyze typical business transactions, construct and interpret financial statements, and use financial and nonfinancial measures to evaluate an organization’s economic performance. You will apply these techniques in a variety of contexts using real data of firms operating around the world and across industries.

Learning Objectives

1. Explain why accounting matters.
2. Explain common accounting terms, concepts, and techniques.
3. Identify relevant information and apply appropriate techniques for investment and strategic decision making.
4. Measure and analyze the effects of typical business transactions on an organization’s financial statements and economic performance.
5. Measure and evaluate the performance of products, services, and organizations.

This course provides an introduction to finance. It addresses the theory and practice of financial management and the generation and allocation of financial resources.

Learning Objectives

1. To provide you with a foundation in the basic concepts of finance, including the time value of money, the role of financial markets, asset valuation, portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the risk-return tradeoff.
2. To develop your skills in financial analysis, planning, and decision-making.
3. To expand your awareness of institutions and practices in business and finance.

This course is an introductory course that provides an overview of Operations Management and Information Systems. It also demonstrates the use of analytical tools in the context of process and systems decisions. The course is structured around the Business Model Canvas, specifically the left-hand side of the BMC, which reflects the operating model of the firm.

The course starts by studying the importance of aligning processes and systems to the overall business model. The course looks at operating models for both product and service companies, which raises many operations questions like capacity, supply chain, quality, and process improvement. The course also looks at digital operating models, which raises information technology questions like platform businesses, winner-take-all markets, operations when marginal costs are zero, and productizing digital offerings. For product/service operating models and digital operating models, analytics will be included as appropriate. This may include forecasting, optimization, and simulation.

Learning Objectives

1. How Business Models Align Market Expectations to Internal Capabilities
   • Explain the relationship between strategy, business models and execution.
   • Explain product business models, service business models and digital business models.
   • Explain the role of market expectations in making operating model decisions.
   • Describe how mismatches between market expectations and operating models can arise.
   • Use the volume/variety tradeoff to explain the challenges associated with these mismatches.
2. How to Evaluate Operating Model Alignment
   • Explain how value propositions connect benefits to attributes
   • Explain the role of operations strategy in managing alignment of the operating model to customer expectations
   • Use product/process profiling, scoring models, breakeven analysis and sensitivity analysis to evaluate alignment and decide what do to about any mismatches
3. Process Management
   • Explain the role of process management in delivering customer value
   • Conduct a basic process analysis including calculating relevant performance metrics like start to finish time and design capacity
   • Explain the three different approaches to process improvement, and how they come together in process thinking

This is the introductory marketing course designed to familiarize students with the practice of marketing in a modern business environment. It takes as its starting point students' every-day observations of marketing activity (e.g., advertisements and retailing) and explains the network of activities and concepts that guide these programs.

Learning Objectives

1. Be able to undertake a 5C analysis to understand the Context or the marketplace, Customers, Collaborators and Competitors
2. Understand the components of a marketing strategy including segmentation of a market, the decision of which target segments to serve and how to positions the offer relative to competitors
3. Also understand the tactical decisions to be made in implementing a Marketing Strategy including:
   • Product / Services development
   • Communication of value to buyer
   • Management of channels to deliver value
   • Price to provide value to customers, channel partners and the company
   • Analytics to measure outcomes at various points in the sales funnel and customer journey.

OAM 330 Organization and Management

This course is designed to help you understand the role that people play in organizations and groups. Throughout your careers, you will work for other people, with other people, and supervise other people. Understanding the human side of organizational life is an essential component of successfully managing and succeeding in these relationships and ultimately in your career.

Learning Objectives

1. Increase your knowledge of organizational behavior concepts so that you can understand and analyze how organizations and the people within them work.
2. Provide you with opportunities to apply organizational behavior concepts to real-world problems faced by managers.
3. Develop your leadership and management potential. Leaders must successfully diagnose problems, communicate clearly, make effective decisions, motivate and influence others, and manage diversity.

OAM 331 Strategic Management

This introductory course on strategy provides a foundational understanding of class strategy concepts and frameworks. Currently in the United States, 2/3 of publicly traded companies lose money. Why is that? Why do some companies succeed while others fail? How can organizations (and individuals) create a sustainable competitive advantage? This course seeks to explore those questions by 1) reviewing core strategy frameworks (e.g., industry analysis, generic strategic positions, corporate vs. competitive strategy) 2) incorporating business tools from other disciplines (e.g., value chain, financial ratios, blue ocean, digital transformation) 3) applying this analytical toolbox to a dozen+ industries/company case studies. Target companies include Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Reliance, Warby Parker, Khan Academy and others. This course features many pre-recorded videos that students can watch prior to class, which then allows the classroom time to be focused on content synthesis, discussion, and debate.

Learning Objectives

1. Learn 20+ of the most common business frameworks used in the diagnosis of business problems and strategy formulation
2. Embrace the motto of "strong opinions, loosely held" where 1) strong opinions are formed through research, rigorous thinking, and asking good questions and 2) there is open- mindedness, appreciation, and tolerance for diverse (often contradicting) data points
3. Be able to craft a persuasive executive memo which succinctly provides the strategic context, identifies the key problems, and provides prioritized recommendations supported by logic and data

One elective based on functional interest or one area flex core course